Lauren Kizi-Ann Alleyne
Mama Remembers Mayaro
The dirt tracks splintered with coconut trees tall with years, dangerous with fruit. The rusty, incontinent standpipe on the corner. The woman bent over it like a boomerang. The heat pressing heavy, the hand of a secret you dare not tell. The sea: that old old water, treacherous as Lucifer. The old fishing boats. Rocks. Sand. The clapboard house shuddering on its stilts. The dark dropping quick like the lid of a coffin. The old noise: crapaud croak, cricket calls, stray dogs howling at jumbies in the wind. The still, still stillness.
Landlocked
I am five, and indifferent to marbles or hop scotch. My foot is propped against the wall, and on three, I push off, arms stretched forward: I run, and I run. I go faster, and faster still – I am determined to fly. I do not yet understand the invisible forces holding me in place; I dream of skylines, archipelagos of cloud, constellations: I soar among them, a strange bird. What I know is that Wonder Woman can do it – bracelets flashing gold, black hair streaming back – and so again and again, I slam the gates, clang their relentless rust, plot how best to unhinge from earth, and align to air. Wind whips through my braids, and my skirt beats about my knees like pleated wings.
Lauren Kizi-Ann Alleyne is a native of Trinidad and Tobago. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University, and is currently an Assistant Professor of English at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Her work has been awarded the 2003 Atlantic Monthly Student Poetry Prize, the Robert Chasen Graduate Poetry Prize at Cornell, and an International Publication Prize from The Atlanta Review. She has been published in journals such as Black Arts Quarterly, The Caribbean Writer, The Belleview Literary Review, and The Banyan Review, as well as in the anthologies Growing Up Girl and Gathering Ground. She is co-editor of From the Heart of Brooklyn, a collection of undergraduate prose, poetry and drama, and her chapbook, Dawn In The Kaatskills, was published in April 2008 by Longshore Press.
